In recent times, as I look at IT departments struggle with issues like outsourcing, vendor management and domain based services, my conclusion is that their core struggle is with distributed work management. While the first stage of outsourcing involved taking a big piece of functionality (IT, H/R or R&D) and giving out to one or two vendors, today's reality is more like giving out smaller pieces to more vendors.
One interesting example is described in Tom Friedman's book. In this instance, a firm on Wall Street provides some research work to Office Tiger. Office Tiger breaks the work down into chunks and distributes the execution to other companies located in different parts of the world. Once each chunk gets completed they are assembled back again by the Wall Street firm and used to service their clients. Many difficult operations were performed to complete this work order. First of all, a service platform allows all the providers to interact in a friction free manner. Who owns this platform? Should the Wall Street firm own all of it or just the piece that contains the integration logic? Second, a complete work order was broken into logical chunks and monitored remotely to meet time and quality requirements. No firm other than the Wall Street firm has complete visibility into the process. Finally, all the subcontractors got a piece of the revenue that was given to Office Tiger. Clearly there is a service delivery platform that lies beneath this story. At BU we are launching a project to study these platforms.